Bob Hawkinson Remembrance

There's a hole in the firmament of American politics today.  Bob Hawkinson – Americanist, Chicago pol, inveterate political gossip, and civic tour de force—has left us all wondering what now?

 

I can't remember when I first met Bob – I had not been on campus very long and neither had he—but was he a force in my life from what I will call the beginning. I was unfortunate enough to draw the short straw and miss out on Bob's Intro to American Politics Class, but I took everything I could after that.  He introduced me to Locke and Rousseau and Mill.  But knowing my particular proclivities, also to Thoreau and Emerson and Whitman.  And to my great pleasure, we spent the sunny afternoons of my senior spring in his seminar room, working our way through Democracy in America.

 

I know I disappointed Bob.  He was pushing me toward a graduate degree in political philosophy or American literature, some avenue to pursue what he called "the life of the mind."  To his dismay, I chose the safe route – law school—but even so, he was in the cheering section for that, too.

 

This afternoon, here on my desk at Portland State University sits the same copy of Democracy in America—the one that I pored over and underlined in pink pen in the spring of 1988, and you know what?  I still turn to it regularly.  I still think about and write about and practice the art of association that amazed and inspired Tocqueville.  And, I still read American poetry in the same breathless search for "poems of democracy."

 

I thought I would have another chance to gossip and laugh with Bob.   I thought I would have another chance to speculate with him about the 2012 Republican primary or whether the sales tax would always be a dead letter in Oregon.  But, as they say, you never know.  Now that the long meandering conversation with Bob is over, I can say this:  Bob Hawkinson taught me what it means to be an American, what it means to be a patriot.   He taught me there is as much space for idealism and pride as there is for disappointment and outrage.   He taught me to read and think and keep holding democracy's feet to the fire.

 

Wendy Willis

Class of 1988